I’m posting a few documents I use regularly for translation (into and from Spanish). The formats can be used for all translation tasks – I just change the text. For the “select the best translation” task, a bit more work is required. The assessment criteria are those used by AQA.

The resources attached are for a higher ability Year 11 GCSE group on the topic of free time, but more specifically on discussing music. The aim is to get the students to give interesting responses to questions about their musical tastes – ones which would score well at Higher Level in the GCSE speaking exam.

There is a video embedded into the PowerPoint which is a brief edit of an interview with a contestant from The Voice in Colombia. The reading comprehension interview with the contestant is made up, but hopefully carries on in the vein of what the singer was saying on the video. All should make sense when you look at the resources, however the first slides aim to build up vocabulary and useful phrases. With slide 8 students discuss each statement giving a personal response using some of the language presented. This then all builds to the comprehension activities. Finally the students prepare their own answers to the last two questions using the language presented and taking David’s responses as examples of good extended answers.

There are plenty of these kinds of things around, but I have produced my own Spanish GCSE vocabulary booklet which is more tailored to the two bottom sets I’m teaching this year (Foundation level, obviously). I am posting it in Word so that anyone who downloads it can make amendments.

I will have finished all of the speaking exams by the end of Tuesday this week, so my focus is going to be on cramming vocabulary, hence the booklet.

I am teaching the film VOLVER as part of the A level Spanish course. There are some great resources and I have relied on the ZigZag booklet as well as the Hodder Education book esp. as I had never taught this before. Attached are some resources I put together on the use of the colour red in the film. A number of the slides are adapted from other resources shared on blogs, etc. Thanks to all those people who share + do not charge money! The PowerPoint starts with a recap from my previous lesson on the theme of death, etc. The videos are adapted from ones I found on YouTube. They required a bit of editing down to make them useable. Hope the resources are of some use.

The attached resource is nothing great and there will be much better versions out there, but I’m sharing in case it is of use to someone. I have two bottom sets for GCSE Spanish and trying to get them all ready for the heavy demands of the new GCSE speaking exam is daunting. I have a number of SEN students who are finding the work challenging. At my school we follow AQA and the attached booklet is one I will be using from March when I will have covered everything topic-wise. From that point I will be concentrating on final preparation for the oral exam as well as exam technique + general revision.

We are using Rachel Hawkes‘ approach to vocabulary acquisition which she terms as ‘non-negotiables’. We are using the term ‘compulsory language’. I start most lessons running through key bits of language (much of which is essential for students to construct language independently). I have attached some PowerPoint slides as an example. As dull as it is, we just work through the slides and they all tell me the meanings. We have mini-tests as well to make sure they are getting to grips with all the terms. The attached PowerPoint is a collection of many of the slides. They aren’t all used together but are dropped into lessons as appropriate.

A quick post to share a PowerPoint. Each slide shows a photo taken from a mixture of exam boards which has been used for the photo card description. I teach bottom sets at the moment for GCSE and I am using the WWWD technique where they describe who, where and what they see + add a description either of a person or the weather. They seem to have found this technique a bit easier to cope with than others I have tried. I have dropped each of the slides into the PowerPoint for their relevant topics so that we constantly practise the technique throughout the course. The PowerPoint below is a compilation of everything I have put together so far. My approach is to show the picture and then run through the WWWD technique with the group to see what they come up with. I have been drilling key high frequency terms such as “hay”, “tiene(n)” etc. which you can see in my examples. My groups do find this activity difficult so the language I have used is fairly simple.